Welcome friend! Once in a while, I love picking up crime thrillers. They make for a great genre to take a quick break from Fantasy as the pace and worlds are completely different. Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie is set in rural Oklahoma and it raises awareness about Missing and Murdered Women, Girls and Two Spirit. Here is how:
Blood Sisters
Vanessa Lillie | Goodreads
A visceral and compelling mystery about a Cherokee archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who is summoned to rural Oklahoma to investigate the disappearance of two women…one of them her sister.
There are secrets in the land.
As an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd Walker spends her days in Rhode Island trying to protect the land’s indigenous past, even as she’s escaping her own.
While Syd is dedicated to her job, she’s haunted by a night of violence she barely escaped in her Oklahoma hometown fifteen years ago. Though she swore she’d never go back, the past comes calling.
When a skull is found near the crime scene of her youth, just as her sister, Emma Lou, vanishes, Syd knows she must return home. She refuses to let her sister’s disappearance, or the remains, go ignored—as so often happens in cases of missing Native women.
But not everyone is glad to have Syd home, and she can feel the crosshairs on her back. Still, the deeper Syd digs, the more she uncovers about a string of missing indigenous women cases going back decades. To save her sister, she must expose a darkness in the town that no one wants to face—not even Syd.
The truth will be unearthed.
Content notes include violence, gun violence, misogyny.
Blood Sisters – Review
Blood Sisters is a deep dive into the psyche of an archaeologist who is haunted by a violent past. It begins fifteen years in the past. Her sister and best friend were watching TV when two masked men attacked the trailer. The girls try to protect themselves and Syd ends up shooting one of the men. This has a lasting effect on Syd as we are bound to find out in the next chapter. By the way, this makes for a terrifying beginning. I was hooked.
In the present time, life has changed. Syd is working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) that have a long and tumulus history with indigenous peoples She has a stressful relationship with her family. Her sister has been abusing drugs for a long time and Syd feels like she is always getting her out of trouble. She was deeply hurt when she had to rescue her sister on the day when she should have been celebrating her wedding. Syd also carries guilt from years ago, for not having protected the girls better. Her personal life is suffering as she is weighed down by so much pain.
Three years after she decided to break away from her family, Syd has to return home as part of an investigation. Something is strange about this case though. It seems like someone is screaming to get her attention. She is not sure who. On learning that her sister has been missing for a few days, her hurts resurface. She falls into old habits, how she used to find her sister before. But a lot has changed since she has been gone.
On top of all that, there is another eye opening situation awaiting at her hometown. The story explores the suffering of an indigenous community with impending displacement as the government tries to buy out her family home.
Through her research for her sister and the case, Syd is plunged into the underbelly of the town. The illegal activities, the town grievances are all connected to Syd’s past.
She has to grow up. She has to learn to let go of her grudges and perceptions. She has to start seeing the truth. She has to start taking the help. The writing does the plot justice.
Blood Sisters is the story of how people who have suffered so much can move forward with the help of family and friends. Openness and empathy heal old wounds. The writing was vivid and evocative. The narrative plays on the bounds between human and the ways in which we torture ourselves when we are deeply disappointed at the way life has turned out. It’s a situation of high conflict, which I read about in Amanda Ripley’s book of the same name. To see what I read there portrayed accurately, makes this book even more real. The interludes between chapters kept the story interesting and offered a glimpse into the citation of another character, someone pivotal to Syd’s life.
Overall, an uncomfortable yet satisfying read.
Find this book on Goodreads. Come join my chat with the author, Vanessa Lillie, tomorrow and see what her hopes for her book were.
Blood Sisters shed light on the history of indigenous peoples in Oklahoma, particularly the Cherokee. As a kid, I read the YA fantasy series, House of Night, but then I didn’t know anything about indigenous peoples then so I appreciate reading about it as an adult.
Many thanks to Berkley Books for a review copy of the book for an honest review.
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